What social media offers reclamation projects
The digital nature of social media technology affords the new terms wider, faster reach. But its capacity for democratic access also writes large and makes immediate and public the political tensions contestations.
For some, social media carries with it the reputation for disrupting regimes to truth (Shirky 2011, Harb 2011). Many hailed the dominant role that social media played in helping organize the protests in Egypt and Iran inspired as proof of their capacity for flattening hierarchies and democratizing the spread of information. Protestors used Twitter and Facebook to assemble impromptu gatherings and broadcast injustices committed by the military and other state police forces. Content spread quickly and widely across very far reaching networks of actors, many of whom with only secondary or tertiary affiliation with the original content creator’s immediate circle of friends, family and followers. Social media evangelists claim that these open and loose systems (e.g., activity determined from the bottom-up) are better than traditional organizations with deep structures (e.g., hierarchies with steep slopes) at addressing and effecting social change.
Social media critics, on the other hand, cite how the same media that supported protests against the state—Facebook and Twitter—were monitored by the state to track dissenters and their affiliates (Lynch 2011, Morozov 2012 and 2009, Shirky 2008). They also point to groups who use social media for organizing around less-than-valiant goals such as maintaining support groups for girls who embrace anorexia and bulimia.In these cases, social media merely reinforced top-down control of events, and it perpetuated the social realities of political suppression and human frailty.
Questions for discussion:
What rhetorical dynamics will facilitate or expedite reclamations penetrating medical and general discourse on autism?
And how will emerging diagnostic technologies such as genetic testing, brain scans, and other evidence of biomarkers disrupt or assist reclamation projects?
